[Air-L] “Synthetic Imaginaries: The Cultural Politics of Generative AI” 08-12 September 2025, University of Siegen

[Pilipets, Elena]

Dear Colleagues,

We warmly invite you to join us in Siegen for the collaborative event "Synthetic Imaginaries: The Cultural Politics of Generative AI".

When?

Monday, 08 September 2025 - Friday, 12 September 2025

About the Event

The five-day event at the University of Siegen—organized by the DFG-funded Collaborative Research Centers "Media of Cooperation" and "Transformations of the Popular" together with the Center of Digital Narratives in Bergen, the Digital Culture and Communication Section of ECREA and the German National Research Data Infrastructure Consortium NFDI4Culture—explores the relationship between synthetic media and today’s imaginaries of culture and technology, which incorporate AI as an active participant.

By “synthetic,” we refer not simply to the artificial but to how specific practices and ways of knowing take shape through human-machine co-creation. "Imaginaries", in turn, reflect shared visions, values, and expectations—shaping not only what technologies do but how they are perceived and made actionable in everyday life. We ask: What images and stories feed the datasets that contemporary AI models are trained on? Which imaginaries are reproduced through AI-driven media technologies and which remain latent? How do synthetic media transform relations of power and visibility, and what methods—perhaps equally synthetic—can we develop to analyze these transformations?

Call for Contributions

Please apply for travel stipends and submit a proposal (max. 500 words) outlining how your work engages with the event’s main theme. Deadline: 20 June 2025. For full details, including suggested topics and the submission link, please visit our website:

https://www.mediacoop.uni-siegen.de/en/events/conference-autumn-school-synthetic-imaginaries/

Participation is free of charge!

Event Highlights

Mix questions!
Monday, 8 September
Day one begins with a keynote by Jill Walker Rettberg and opens space for emerging questions—think of it as an idea hub. Accepted abstracts will be grouped into thematic sessions curated by the organising team. Presenters will be connected via email ahead of time to coordinate their contributions. Each presentation will be set to 10 minutes to allow ample time for discussion, collective thinking, and exchange. The emphasis is on dialogue, not polished conclusions.

Mix methods!
Tuesday, 9 September-Thursday, 11 September
The next three days—featuring workshops by Gabriele De Seta and Ángeles Briones—are about exploring new methods, hands-on! We invite you to join a team of interdisciplinary scholars and data designers in probing new methodological combinations. Each of our project teams will present a research question alongside a specific method to be collaboratively explored. Participants will not only learn how to design prompts and work with AI-generated text and images but also how to critically account for genAI models as platform models. All projects draw on intersectional approaches, combining qualitative and quantitative data to explore the synthetic dimensions of AI agency—whether as content creator, noise generator, hallucinator, research collaborator, data annotator, or style imitator. Please bring your laptops. The project titles will be announced soon.

Synthesize!
Friday, 12 September
The final day is dedicated to sharing, reflecting, and synthesizing the questions, methods, and insights developed throughout the week. Project teams will present their collaborative processes, highlight key takeaways, and discuss how their ideas and approaches shifted through hands-on experimentation with methods.

Questions?

Feel free to get in touch:
elena.pilipets at uni-siegen.de
ecreadigitalculture at gmail.com

We look forward to your contributions—see you in Siegen!
Elena